Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Friday, September 14, 2018

B°TONG - Monastic

Reverse Alignment: 2017

How, exactly, is this pronounced? Bow Tong? Bu Tang? Be Degrees of 'Tong'? Also, is this supposed to be upper-case or lower-case, because I've seen both, even within his own Bandcamp page. The casing is important, because I don't know whether the name should be whispered or shouted from the rooftops. Is it some ancient, fancy German or Scandinavian dialect my Canadian hinterland upbringing has made me ignorant of? As we are dealing with a dark ambient project, perhaps it's some super-secret scripture code, the likes of which only those who've read the deepest passages of Lovecraft Lore could ever have a hope of comprehending, but to comprehend is to succumb to the utter madness that comes with comprehension of all that is and shall not be unto itself. Or maybe it's just a collection of characters that look cool together, and aren't meant to be spoken aloud. Hey, works for me – one of the reasons I stick to the written word, and not video on the Vimeo.

For those writing the B°TONG cheques, you can use the name Chris Sigdell. He's been an active musician for some three decades now, flitting between various aliases and noisy industrial bands in that time. Probably his most famous group was NID, though more recently he's gone the way of doom metal in Leaden Fumes. b°tong (sorry, but until I've a concrete answer of which version is correct, I'm gonna' be flippin' them) sprung up around the time NID ended, and has resulted in over twenty albums in a mere decade of activity. Sounds about right for a post-industrial noise-experimental dark ambient project, especially one that I've never heard of until stumbling upon it in Reverse Alignment's catalogue. Can't say I'm familiar with any of B°TONG's previous labels though (Verato Project, Snowy Tension Pole, gears of sand, Attenuation Circuit, Like A/An Everflowing Stream, Hots), but some of his older albums do look intriguing. I wonder what's the deal with that Ov Elf And Haarp?

Mr. Sigdell made his debut on Reverse Alignment with two albums, this one and The Long Journey. I'm... not sure why I passed on the latter, as it's about the black hole at the centre of our galaxy – sounds right up my cosmic drone alley! Instead, I picked up Monastic, an album inspired by the New Swabia conspiracy theories. You know, that ol' chestnut about a secret Nazi base buried under the Antarctic ice, existing to this day. Maybe Hitler's kept there too, under cryostasis. I don't know about that, though it would be funny if he rose one day with cryo-frozen Stalin and cryo-frozen Disney to take over the world.

This is an album that features a lot of cavernous, claustrophobic field recordings, desolate drones, chilly soundscapes, and distant voices echoing off deep, frozen tunnels. You sense there's some sort of civilization lurking in all these ice caverns, but damned if you can find them. And maybe damned if you do find them.